Hey all i been noticing a trend in the new games these last few weeks. More and more are allowing the possibility of starting stats of higher than 18. The rolling method has 20's as the normal.

Now the Dms of these games say they have take this into account when designing encounters but since i have yet to be accepted into one of these games i wonder how do you take this into account. Do they consider the PCs a higher CR when throwing things at you? how do you calculate these new power you have given to your PCS? I assume the NPCs have the same rolls for stats as well. The final question is, is there a better way to do this?

Personally I am a tad dubious about this. Increasing stats does not just make the players more powerful, it also shifts the balance around a bit. It's subtle, so I can't say it would necessarily affect the game significantly one way or another, but it's something to be aware of.

For example, I could make a Monk who puts his highest stat in Str and still has a good Dex, Con and Wis. I could be looking at a +8-10 or so to AC from Dex and Wis combined. That's as good as a Fighter in Full Plate with a +1 Dex. Suddenly the fragile Monk is looking pretty solid, given he still has as good a Str as the Fighter too.

Everyone's saves are going to be a bit higher because their secondary stats will all be a bit better. In fact, they'll be getting bonuses to everything and penalties to little or nothing.

Now, in some ways these may be good alterations. MAD characters can come out a bit more, and the bonus from stats round out some of the differences between high HP and low HP, high saves and low saves, etc. I means that Fighters can get Combat Expertise without harming themselves too much, and so on. However, it favours some characters over others so I'm not sure it's a thing which can easily be accounted for.

Also bumps up caster save DCs, which is deadly significant, since balance was to have a roughly 50% chance of making an equivalent level spell "stick" without focused modifiers that usually cost really valuable resources (like feats and specialization). If you can start with a +5 modifier, and a few other tricks, you can achieve that 95% chance of your spells working. Every. Time.

only if if the creatures are of your ECL. So if you get it to 95% FOR YOUR LVL when the DM throws a ECL 5 level higher than you, its back to 50%. but what i am interested in how do you know how much more to throw at your guys without TPK

It depends on the specifics of the roll - casters would already have their high stat high, but not everyone would necessarily have their save stats high. If the roll shifts everything up equally, everything's equal. If it increases the range, then yeah the casters win because their key stat is a lot higher. If it means that just plain everything is higher, well, the boosts people get to Con and Wis will be bigger than the primary casting boosts, making it harder to make save-or-else spells work.

Which is why it's quite subtle. It's not just the average roll which matters, but things like the variance. Personally I'd just do point buy and be done with it.

3d6 - average stat is a 10.5, worst stat is a 3, best stat is an 18. However, using 3 dice will cluster stats into 9 to 14
1d20 - average stat is a 10.5, worst stat is a 1! best stat is a 20. However, there is NO clustering of stats, so they can be anything

Technically they are no different, neither one creates higher stats or lower stats. 3d6 gives better average stats. You are more likely to get characters with all stats in the 10 to 14 range with 3d6 than with 1d20

Ya know, I've been thinking about running a game with stat rolls of 3m4d8v1r1+2 and 3m4d4 to get your six ability scores. Such rolls would create a mixture of really epic stats in some areas, and really weak stats in others.

but steam as a DM that IS running a game with high stats, how do you balance out the encounters, as people have posted it increases saves and spells powers as well, so what do you do to bring the encounters up to a level that the party doesnt just walk over the monsters? do you increase the monsters stats as well? Or use higher CR? How much higher? How do you figure that out?

Well, to counter it out, you up the stats on the monsters, increase their resistances, throw in Spell Resistance, up the DR, up the HP, increase the +attack.

Generally, I average out a parties stats and determine just how much I need to improve monsters to still be a challenge. Though, there are times where I want my players to be of epic power and simply steamroll monsters for a level or 2.